With the Los Angeles Lakers now, we’re all rubberneckers at the scene of a grisly, 12-car pileup. We’re repulsed, but we can’t look away.

They deserve for America to look away. Looking at them strictly from the bottom line, temporarily pushing aside the Kobe drama, the Dwight drama, the Kobe-vs.-Dwight drama and all the rest, this is a team that’s still three games under .500 with the All-Star break a week away, with around two months left in the regular season and with two teams ahead of them in the playoff standings.

The Lakers, contrary to all expectations, are not contenders for the NBA championship. Maybe the HMA championship—the Hot Mess Association. In that, they’re the runaway favorites. And they’ll get the nation tuning in, again, on Sunday when they play at the Miami Heat.

As usual, the San Antonio Spurs, with the NBA’s best record, can’t buy a headline or a SportsCenter lead or a trending topic online. Neither can the NBA’s biggest surprise, the Indiana Pacers, or even the Derrick Rose-less contender Chicago Bulls.

The winter storm blanketing huge sections of the country? It still doesn’t blanket us the way the storm of Lakers news does.

But we can’t look away.

We need to, though, because we’ve just gone through this, in another sport, for the past six months. These Lakers, at this point in this over-exposed train-wreck of a season, are nothing more than the New York Jets in tank tops and shorts.

Big on name recognition. Big on transcendent personalities. Big on non-stop controversy on- and off-court (or field). Big on every element a soap opera requires, including a daily time slot.

But … small on wins.

Come on, a naysayer might complain. You can’t compare the Jets, who have done nothing lately or even in the past few decades, have no future Hall of Famers and were a joke from the beginning, to the Lakers, who have 16 banners hanging in their building and have four immortals in uniform this season.

Objection noted. However … the Jets give you the lightning rod that is Tim Tebow, and the Lakers easily counter with the lightning rod that is Kobe Bryant. Try to find one person on this planet who has a neutral opinion on either one, who isn’t susceptible to an instant tirade one way or another about him.

You wish everybody would stop talking about them … until you realize you can’t stop talking about them yourself.

So it goes, for certain, with Bryant, who burned himself into everybody’s consciousness again this week with his remarks about how his still-relatively-new teammate, the accomplished and wounded but sensitive and childish Howard, is handling his injuries. Or isn’t handling them.

Bryant, of course, followed up his comments with various accusations that the media took it “out of proportion.’’

As if it was possible for someone of Bryant’s magnitude and history to utter one syllable that won’t be put under a microscope and given maximum circulation. And as if Bryant didn’t know that when he said what he said.

The follow-up on all of that, of course, was a nationally televised blowout loss in Boston, and, on Friday night, a 20-point hole in Charlotte before a desperate rally to pull out a win.

The Lakers are playing terribly, and they know it. They also know they have a spotlight on them that isn’t going away. They’re not going to be able to hide their flaws or recede into obscurity; they cannot transform into the 76ers or Pistons or Blazers or Mavericks, to name four other NBA teams looking uphill at the playoffs from similar positions.

They’re mediocre at best. But their mediocrity remains on public display. No one feels sorry for them. In fact, despite the complaints about the endless updates about a losing team at the expense of nearly everybody else, the public gets a big kick out of it. They even get a kick out of the complaining.

Yes, this should sound familiar. Everybody spent all season complaining about the excess coverage of the failing and flailing Jets. Everybody also knew every detail of the excess coverage and of the failing and flailing … because they were unable or unwilling to turn it off.

In the end, it hardly felt worth it, though, with the Jets. The nation’s fan base looked back at the season and thought, “Why do I know so much about a 6-10 team?”

The Lakers are plunging headlong in that same direction. It’s an even more harrowing ride there, of course, because they are one of the sport’s flagship franchises, three seasons removed from back-to-back championships, still hauling around the league’s most star-studded roster.

It’s on pace to be hauled into the last West playoff berth, or into a seat on the couch when the postseason begins.

America will know every detail of the trip there, too. And, like with their football counterparts, it will ask itself, “Why did I pay so much attention to that?”